Yup, with some help from our friends at McSweeney's.
From a piece in the New Yorker...
With the help of McSweeney’s, ESPN The Magazine has amassed in its Fiction Issue nine stories and five “What-If’s,” the latter being exercises which ask you to imagine that Tom Brady isn’t special or that Pat Tillman didn’t die. (Perhaps these can be blamed on the fact that Fantasy Football is shut down until next September, thereby depriving those imaginative sports fans of a less pretentious, less public creative outlet.) As for the stories, they’re all connected, however tangentially, with athletic endeavor. Among the more notable authors are Wells Tower, Dave Eggers, John Brandon, and Miguel Batista, a sixteen-year M.L.B. veteran who’s also published a book of poetry and a novel.
The stories cover a wide range of sports-related concerns, from blue-chip college recruitment to Olympian feats as achieved by flabby weekend warriors. Each is not without its high points, but collectively the stories can’t help but feel a bit bloodless, like commissioned projects in which the prose is subordinate to theme. That being said, it was generous of ESPN to throw fiction a bone, even if it comes during what is probably the slowest sports-watching period of the year (football is finished; baseball hasn’t started; college basketball is yet to the point of filling out brackets; professional basketball could conceivably not name a champion until June 17th; and Hockey, well, let’s be serious). So, until the next great clash of rivals, be content, ESPN says, with this helping of stuff made-up.
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